Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

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This was many years ago, so it was mostly reboots, reconfiguring settings, and things like that.

But a good friend of mine has a very awesome job: he is employed by a very large manufacturing company that makes consumer products. They have dozens of plants all over north america, most of which run machines from companies that are out of business or the lines are no longer supported. When one of these antiquated machines break and the on-site service techs can't fix it or don't have spares they call him in. He will basically pull an old ISA card out of a machine, troubleshoot what broke, and replace board level components. He has a stash of old harddrives from eBay. Every version of old software you can imagine. In a few cases he has made new controller boards completely from scratch (including dumping firmware off of chips and flashing it on to new ones). When you are losing $200k an hour with a line down, "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch" isn't a silly response to the plant manager.

> "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch"

That guy must have had a steady hand and be really quick with the soldering iron. Making a new controller board while a 200k $ / hour line is down, well I always suspected my job was boring, now I know.

When the possibly of losing $200k an hour with a line down even exists, "screw it, I'll have a few spares made" seems like it would be a less silly idea the plant manager might want to consider.

You'd think so and in some cases you'd be right, but plant managers can pick the strangest things to be tight about.

I remember fighting to get some UPSes on important machines once upon a time. I don't remember going even one single summer without having a power outage. In fact, there were normally several per year.

Surely if you could lose $200k an hour, you would want to ensure you have spares for absolutely everything already on site before the problems occur. Redundancy is an amazing thing.

It depends on whether we're speaking of turnover or profit. An average profit of 200K$/h for a single production line must be very rare (but it may exist). You're almost always not really 'loosing' 200K$ (otoh you'll surely be late in delivering your customers, and that may be valuable, think 'late delivering fees').

When you're 'only' earning an average 20K$/h (10% profit is an ok number I would say, but it may be far less if it's a common finished good), then it may have sens not to pursue buying couples of every single spare part you should have. The full price for always having in stock working spare parts for 100% of a 3M$ production line could be well in the tens of hundreds per month. At the end you're cutting your profit and that's the last thing you want to report to the board, as a plant manager.

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